When a debtor files for a Chapter 13 bankruptcy in a bankruptcy court, the creditors associated with the debtor need to file proofs of claims (POCs) with the bankruptcy court in order to be included in the repayment plan under Chapter 13. Each court has its own electronic system for accepting the electronic filings of proofs of claims. This process is fairly simple for a creditor that needs to file a single proof of claim with a single bankruptcy court.
The proof of claim filing process is not that simple for a creditor with many proofs of claims to file. A large creditor such as a bank may be associated with a number of debtors. For example, an issuer bank may have a number of different debtors who have defaulted on loans made by the bank. These debtors may have filed for bankruptcy in the various bankruptcy courts around the country. In some cases, the bank may have to file proofs of claims in almost 100 different, separate court systems. This is a particularly burdensome and time consuming task. In addition, any information resulting from the filing of a proof of claim may not be systematically tracked for the bank, since it is likely that the filing systems for one or more court systems may not interface with the bank's computer system.
It would be desirable to allow creditors such as banks to systematically file proofs of claims in various bankruptcy courts and allow those banks to systematically track such filings. This will ultimately decrease the cost of bankruptcy processing to those creditors and will ultimately allow them to process more claims and recover more of their debts.
Another problem associated with filing many proofs of claims is that the various bankruptcy courts have filing systems that are not configured in the same way. This makes it difficult to do automatic mass proof of claim filings.
One way to address this is to create a computer program for each individual court. Each computer program would be specifically created and adapted to a particular court and allow for automatic filing. This option, however, is particularly time consuming. In addition, even if it could be done, courts often change the configurations of their filing systems, and such specialized computer programs would need to be consistently and manually updated each time a court decides to change the configuration of its filing system. This again is a laborious task that may be impractical in some cases.
Embodiments of the invention address the above problems, as well as other problems.